Iran’s new stealth jet, or is it?

Iran wants you to believe that it has a new stealth fighter with all the bells and whistles to compete with the U.S. military’s F-22 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran Defense Ministry Ahmad Vahidi attended a Feb. 2 unveiling of what the Iranians are calling the Qaher 313.

Of course, plenty of questions revolve around the authenticity of the Iranian stealth fighter. From the pictures, the cockpit glass is a dead give away at how unreal this plane likely is. John Reed at Foreign Policy took a deeper dive.

“In fact, it looks like the Iranians dumped some rudimentary flight controls and an ejection seat into a shell molded in what they thought were stealthy angles,” Reed writes.

He goes further writing: “The jet is so small it looks like the man is sitting in a clown car, er, clown fighter. It’s seriously unlikely that such an aircraft has room to carry the avionics, radars, electronic countermeasures, heat masking gear, and, most importantly for a fighter, the weapons that make modern stealth jets effective.”